The first weekend of February, the ULB Campus in Brussels held one of the biggest events in Europe about open source communities and development, the FOSDEM. Some Zentyalers decide to take few days off and go to that nice city and enjoy the weather (just kidding although it wasn’t that bad… ), all the talks and interesting people that get together.

Of course I was one of team members who joined the event, and besides the great beer, I especially liked a talk that the community of Libre Office gave. It was about the path they have been following lately and how they have refactored and improved such a great application. Here is a link to the video in case you want to enjoy an interesting talk.

There were two things that really touched me. The first one was the culture shift they suffer to allow them to build a better product and empower new contributors to collaborate with them. Short iterations, don’t ask permission ask forgiveness, embrace change… and the most important of all of them, have fun developing Fantastic!!!

The second one, was quality. They have done a big effort to build quality in the core of their project. Doing unit tests, refactoring to improve the code and its maintainability and what’s more important, giving the quality the necessary importance to reduce the bugs to a minimum. We definitively share that vision and have always considered that the best way to assure quality is to build it from the beginning, inside your products, not leaving it for the last part of the project or any other phase.

At Zentyal we have always put a great effort in building our products with the best quality. Moreover, in the past months we have done a similar switch to a more quality centered development. We are still working on fully changing our focus, but you can see already some of the improvements in the community version as well as in the Software and Security updates of the commercial commercial versions.